I'm not talking about speeds or detours which are largely beside the point. Broder didn't charge his car overnight (despite knowing it needed it), and he drove past recharging stations when his car was low. Whatever bad advice he claims to have received, and whatever detours he might have made, as a general rule it's unrealistic to assume that a normal driver would do either of these things unless they'd also do the gasoline equivalent.
Ed Murrow may have done. There are countless journalists out there who believe they're making the world a better place, using their craft to inform and explain, but they all know the difference between a good story and an important story, and the really, really, good journalists try to make important stories into good stories. Nobody would have read John Pilger's 1970s expose of Pol Pot's Cambodia (which scandalized Britain) if he didn't know how to keep the reader on the edge of his or her seat.
It's more obvious that movies are a form of entertainment. They're 99% fiction, and a good movie (off topic note: Die Hard 5 is fucking awful. Just warning you. My wife and I saw it last night, attrocious. Gigli is a better movie.) is rarely an important movie (by which I mean a movie that tries to convey an important message.)
Steven Spielberg knows that. And when you saw ET as a kid, you were entertained. But you were also entertained when you watched Schindler's List (assuming you weren't making out in the back row); Spielberg is a good director, and like a good journalist, he knows the difference between a good story and an important story, but can make an important story into a good movie.
Recognize journalism for what it is. Journalism is about entertainment first. On occasion, if you're lucky, this will co-incide with getting better informed.
Journalism is journalism, it's a form of entertainment and the major problem with it is that it's our only source of what's happening outside in the world unless we know people involved in those events that we trust (which we don't. And if we did, well, that'd be just one person too.)
My epiphany about journalism came in the infamous Observer piece accusing Demon Internet (a major UK ISP) of selling child porn because it had an NNTP server, and anon.penet.fi - an anonymous emailer system that was used by groups like Amnesty International - of being a conduit for child porn even though that was almost a technical impossibility. The Observer was, at the time, one of Britain's most respected newspapers, largely independent, fearless, and frequently willing to speak truth to power. There were minor issues during a recently previous period in which it was owned by a gold mining company, but it wasn't owned by them any more, and even during that period it had a nearly unblemished reputation for truth.
The Observer just made shit up, used a very obvious piece of sophistry to justify it, and put it on the front page. And never apologized.
Why? Because they could. Scandals sell papers, and if you can take some snapshot of the world and create a tortured argument that it was scandalous, you can invent a scandal.
And so we get to Broder, who may or may not be as guilty as Musk says, but, even discounting 90% of what Musk claims, operated his Tesla in a way no Tesla owner would have done in the real world in a deliberate attempt to get the failure he wanted.
Why? Because he could. Scandals sell papers, and if you can take some snapshot of the world and create a tortured argument that it was scandalous, you can invent a scandal.
Are you sure? I don't see the patent online, but it certainly would appear that long before the patent ended up in this courtroom the patent was actually granted in the first place, and while I'm unfamiliar with Australian law, it does appear to be in line with similar patent laws in the EU and US (so I'd assume a high likelihood that Australian law has also been modified to recognize gene patents.)
Nor is the judge making a comment about financial incentives evidence of anything either. It's not unusual for judges to explain the purported purpose of a law they're upholding - though more common in criminal cases involving somewhat less controversial laws.
I don't see any evidence here that the judge has done anything outside of what the Australian legislature has explicitly demanded. Bad laws can and are frequently passed. It seems to be the anger should be focused on a government that appears to have kowtowed to biotech industry interests, both in passing bad patent laws, and in granting this company such a patent.
Funny though how they only seem to feel the need to make shit up when it comes to electric cars.
Imagine if the reviewer had, instead, written about the latest Ford/GM/Chrysler Crossover, and announced that it was barely able to make it on the road before running out of fuel, oil, and R134a refrigerant for the A/C.
That would also have gotten them some eyeballs.
I think bias has a lot to do with this. Half the country thinks that the incremental cost of each Chevy Volt is about $50k because the anti-electric mob performed a dubious calculation that included sunk costs divided by total units sold early on in the car's history (you have to wonder why Apple ever made the iPod, as by these guys calculations the first few hundred cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make...) and it's become a thing, especially in the automotive industry, to just pretend that the technology is attrociously bad.
No wonder Tesla Motors is upset. They're trying something new, in the process trying to make the world a better place (yes, I know they're also out to make money, but they could make a luxury car with fewer acceptance problems if they just stuck a six cylinder engine in it, and make a lot more money as a result), and they're being pissed all over by irrational jackasses who are more obsessed with upsetting environmentalists than they are with actually enjoying themselves or being happy.
Cool story bro. However, in today's world "right wing extremists" refers to members of the Republican party with extreme authoritarian positions. Sure, the Republican church is a broad church, but it's not Ron Paul we're talking about, it's evil nutjobs like former terrorist fundraiser and current Islamaphobe Peter King, and much of the Tea Party caucus who seem to think that spending money on healthcare is tyranny, but spending it on imprisoning foreigners without trial is A-OK as long as they're suspected of terrorism.
(As for defining liberalism by the war time excesses of an all-over-the-map populist President seventy years ago, I hope you can see the problem with that.)
I'm aware of Open JDK, but seeing that the code is targeted for Linux, I don't see that as a truly open solution for most users.
Well, that's a shame, because if you don't use the same definition of the word "open" as the rest of us we can't actually answer your question. We have no way of saying "Well, there's FoozleJava 3.X", and you then responding, "No, I'm saying I want it to be truly open", and us saying "But there are ports to every platform in existance, and it's under the GPL", and you saying "Yes, but I'm using my definition of the word open, and that means it has to be compatible with the Microsoft Public License.
And after we go around in circles a few times, we throw our hands up in exasperation.
OpenJDK is free software. It's licensed under a free license. It is built using a community model of development, albeit one steered by Oracle. And to answer your concern, which seems to be more about portability than openness, it's largely POSIX code and has been ported to the BSDs (cite: https://wikis.oracle.com/display/OpenJDK/BSDPort)
No, it definitely was a few months, and no, peer reviewed science that's been the scientific consensus for something like four decades now, while continuing to attract pseudo-scepticism from certain influential political groups and popular media outlets, is hardly a "fad".
Every fucking time there's a global warming article, some idiot has to pretend that scientists were similarly convinced by "global cooling" in the 1970s. The fact is a hypothesis was raised that was quickly proven false and scientists went on to look at other things. No amount of "But the media hyped it" or "But Vegans against Tree Rape hyped it" or "But my third grade social studies teacher hyped it" type arguments change those facts.
Old Union working practices are/were certainly part of the problem, but they're not the whole story. A huge amount of this is economies of scale (not monetary, but in being able to run well) when you're making the same things as the factory next door, and have the market split between you and a hundred other companies.
Regulatory? To a certain extent, but it's interesting that when people rail against "regulations" and "bureaucracy", it's rare that they can make a compelling case that a particular regulation is causing a problem. That's not true in all cases (I continue to be amazed that the US railroad system works as well as it does given the ludicrous regulatory and taxation based infrastructure it continues to grapple with), but wanting to start a factory? For the most part, the additional regulations you need to deal with that you don't starting, say, an office, are to do with safety and the environment. Given we don't want our workers to lose their hands or die, and we don't want our rivers poluted with toxic waste, I'm not entirely sure I want the regulations changed unless we're very, very, careful.
When I lost my job three years ago, I started getting calls from Indian outsourcing centers who were trying to hire me. They weren't trying to get me to move to India either! Turned out their clients found the timezone/language*/distance thing an issue, and wanted American developers, they just didn't want them on their own payroll.
So no, American developers didn't lose their jobs to cheaper Indian counterparts. They lost their jobs because American businesses didn't want to employ programmers, they wanted to hire outside companies to do the work on a long term basis, and India had the right model - groups of anonymous programmers, charging by the hour, who would do work based upon specs you'd provide.
And if it wasn't for the timezone/language*/distance thing, it'd have been a complete success and IT staff in the US would be having the same problems as factory workers. As it is, IT suffered very little impact from the recession.
In some ways, it would be worth American entrepreneurs looking at the Indian outsourcing models, looking at where they're succeeding, and where they're not, and look to build local businesses that offer the same services, before some other country does eat our lunch again.
* Yes, I know English is well spoken in India, but accents and dialects have an impact.
Global cooling was taught in my middle school science text books. I remember the "Igloo Effect" specifically.
It's worth pointing out that I also received dubious presentations of unscientific material when I was at Middle School. I remember being told that all oil would run out in 20 years. They even had a presentation by some outside experts to warn us of the impending oil shortage. Was it ever a scientific consensus that all oil would disappear in that time scale? No. Did some environmentalists keep making the claim based upon a dubious argument about the availability of known oil supplies and a complete misunderstanding of economics? Well, yes, but that doesn't change the lack of scientific credibility for the argument. Did the media hype the story? Why yes, but it remains meaningless. And for what it's worth, the "20 years" thing seemed to last... well, 20 years, always being 20 years no matter when the urgent call to action was being made, while "global cooling" was a fad for a few months.
There was never anything approaching a scientific consensus about global cooling, and indeed it was debunked as a hypothesis within a few months of appearing on the radar. It made it into the MSM you say? Why, there's a surprise! Because we all know that the Weekly World News is on a par with Nature for its peer reviewed science.
As for your last paragraph, I strongly suggest you start reading up on the subject rather than relying upon tired simplifications from Fox News (or your Middle School, I guess) and actually start listening to what climate scientists are actually saying, rather than twisted contextually challenged versions of what they're saying. It's certainly more than reasonable for a climate scientist to assert that more severe weather events may be due to temperature changes, given temperature changes will have an affect on weather patterns. But no-one in the climate science group will ever tell you that a particular blizzard was "caused by" global warming.
Nobody has lost a job in the US because someone else could do the job in another country for less.
I can safely say this because while labor may make up a high proportion of the costs of goods and services that you buy, manufacturing labor (as in "people who man assembly lines" - the people who actually lose their jobs when Dell closes a factory and buys circuit boards from Foxconn) make up a tiny proportion of the labor portion. The classic 80:20 rule, which applied during the 1980s and is, today, even worse, tells you that 80% of the "labor" portion of the goods is paid to the top 20% high earners in each company, and high earners generally haven't been outsourced.
Why, then, did Dell and others outsource? Flexibility. It's about being able to send a new PCB layout to a factory and receive the first batch of 100,000 circuit boards inside of a week rather than months. The simple truth is that Foxconn et al ate our lunches. They weren't cheaper (not significantly, anyway), they were simply better at it, and very attractive to companies that didn't want to spend time and money on running a large, inflexible, corporation.
...which is what he should do, given the dubious legality of the prison camp to begin with. And yes, there will be people pointing the finger at him, but he has at least three excellent come back arguments:
1. Congress has had years to do something about this and has refused to act.
2. The camp is unconstitutional.
3. The camp does more harm than good.
The problem is we have a President who prefers to appear to be a wimpy appeaser of right wing extremists than be an actual liberal.
Well, define gun (and for that matter define "make".) Anyone can make a zip gun, but something more sophisticated without using prebuilt parts designed to be part of a gun does take a certain amount of specialist knowledge and the type of tools that aren't found in most people's garages.
The practical upshot of the "printable AR-15 lower" is that it's now possible for someone with a 3D printer to usefully order an AR-15 by mail. That's it. In theory a minor legislative tweak, for example, requiring that bolt carriers and barrels be subject to the same rules that a "gun" as defined by the ATF (ie no mail order except between FFL holders) would fix that and return everything to the status quo.
The printable magazine? Virtually everyone who's been asked to comment on the proposed restrictions on magazine sizes has said the same thing: that it's a nice token gesture, but it's not enforceable because of the ease with which it can be circumvented. Indeed, I suspect most lay-people actually underestimate, not overestimate, the work required to make a useful detachable magazine.
If you've ever been to a bookshop you'll have seen books on sale at ridiculously low prices too. It's not unheard of in any industry to put things on "special offer" in order to "sell more stuff".
In addition, this case is about Amazon trying to make its ebooks less expensive than Apple's, B&N's, etc. It is not about Amazon trying to undercut paper book prices, and indeed, as the GGP correctly noted, Amazon frequently charges more for eBooks than new paper books (and virtually always more for eBooks than Amazon charges for used paper copies.)
I'm not sure why you'd think people are buying Kindles to get cheaper books, but it just isn't true, and that's not the attraction.
People aren't buying eBooks because they're cheap, they're buying them because you can be pretty much anywhere, and suddenly think "Wait? Stephen King has a new book out? It's been WEEKS since the last one!", whip out your Kindle, select the book, buy it, and start reading it within a minute of having that thought.
And later that day, you can think "Hmmm, what was that fuss about involving King and Kubrick? Oh yeah, I read about that in "The Making of The Shining", let me just take a look at that. And you can witch to that book.
And then you can think "OMG, I don't remember where it was in this tome, but hold on, I have this nifty search button", and then find the relevent pages.
eBooks are 100% about convenience, and 0% about price. It's instant gratification. And while you lose one type of flexibility, you gain other types. And the ability to search or have access to your book without notice may well be more useful to you than the ability to have a copy 20 years from now, or the ability to lend the book to a friend.
I think you might be thinking of the website, which underwent a rebranding recently to distance itself from the cable news network. This popular MSNBC show, for example, has MSNBC branding all over it: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3036789/ns/msnbc_tv-morning_joe/
It can be if it presents something in a negative light that's technically true on one level, but not in the sense that readers will think.
The way the campaign will be interpreted is that your privacy is being breached by the people of Google who are reading (not automatically processing) your emails. The reality is that an algorithm is used by a non-sentient computer to determine relevent ads to show you.
I, in common with most people I guess, really don't give two hoots about the latter. Indeed, as I've said before, if ads are going to be foisted on me, I'd rather see ads for Android phones and S&M equipment than for women's shoes and motorcycle insurance. And I care about how Google determines the former are more suited than the latter and the privacy controls it implements to prevent such data falling into the wrong hands, not the fact that Google figures it out in the first place.
I generally agree although I also don't think it needs to be quite as sophisticated as it is. But that said, answering my own criticism, does supporting multiple character sets, colors, and screen sizes really add so much bloat it'd be worth stripping it down?
Slashdot Mirror
He has TWO facial expressions. TWO.
I'm not talking about speeds or detours which are largely beside the point. Broder didn't charge his car overnight (despite knowing it needed it), and he drove past recharging stations when his car was low. Whatever bad advice he claims to have received, and whatever detours he might have made, as a general rule it's unrealistic to assume that a normal driver would do either of these things unless they'd also do the gasoline equivalent.
Ed Murrow may have done. There are countless journalists out there who believe they're making the world a better place, using their craft to inform and explain, but they all know the difference between a good story and an important story, and the really, really, good journalists try to make important stories into good stories. Nobody would have read John Pilger's 1970s expose of Pol Pot's Cambodia (which scandalized Britain) if he didn't know how to keep the reader on the edge of his or her seat.
It's more obvious that movies are a form of entertainment. They're 99% fiction, and a good movie (off topic note: Die Hard 5 is fucking awful. Just warning you. My wife and I saw it last night, attrocious. Gigli is a better movie.) is rarely an important movie (by which I mean a movie that tries to convey an important message.)
Steven Spielberg knows that. And when you saw ET as a kid, you were entertained. But you were also entertained when you watched Schindler's List (assuming you weren't making out in the back row); Spielberg is a good director, and like a good journalist, he knows the difference between a good story and an important story, but can make an important story into a good movie.
Recognize journalism for what it is. Journalism is about entertainment first. On occasion, if you're lucky, this will co-incide with getting better informed.
Journalism is journalism, it's a form of entertainment and the major problem with it is that it's our only source of what's happening outside in the world unless we know people involved in those events that we trust (which we don't. And if we did, well, that'd be just one person too.)
My epiphany about journalism came in the infamous Observer piece accusing Demon Internet (a major UK ISP) of selling child porn because it had an NNTP server, and anon.penet.fi - an anonymous emailer system that was used by groups like Amnesty International - of being a conduit for child porn even though that was almost a technical impossibility. The Observer was, at the time, one of Britain's most respected newspapers, largely independent, fearless, and frequently willing to speak truth to power. There were minor issues during a recently previous period in which it was owned by a gold mining company, but it wasn't owned by them any more, and even during that period it had a nearly unblemished reputation for truth.
The Observer just made shit up, used a very obvious piece of sophistry to justify it, and put it on the front page. And never apologized.
Why? Because they could. Scandals sell papers, and if you can take some snapshot of the world and create a tortured argument that it was scandalous, you can invent a scandal.
And so we get to Broder, who may or may not be as guilty as Musk says, but, even discounting 90% of what Musk claims, operated his Tesla in a way no Tesla owner would have done in the real world in a deliberate attempt to get the failure he wanted.
Why? Because he could. Scandals sell papers, and if you can take some snapshot of the world and create a tortured argument that it was scandalous, you can invent a scandal.
Are you sure? I don't see the patent online, but it certainly would appear that long before the patent ended up in this courtroom the patent was actually granted in the first place, and while I'm unfamiliar with Australian law, it does appear to be in line with similar patent laws in the EU and US (so I'd assume a high likelihood that Australian law has also been modified to recognize gene patents.)
Nor is the judge making a comment about financial incentives evidence of anything either. It's not unusual for judges to explain the purported purpose of a law they're upholding - though more common in criminal cases involving somewhat less controversial laws.
I don't see any evidence here that the judge has done anything outside of what the Australian legislature has explicitly demanded. Bad laws can and are frequently passed. It seems to be the anger should be focused on a government that appears to have kowtowed to biotech industry interests, both in passing bad patent laws, and in granting this company such a patent.
No, that was written two days ago in response to Musk's original (tweeted) criticism of the article.
Funny though how they only seem to feel the need to make shit up when it comes to electric cars.
Imagine if the reviewer had, instead, written about the latest Ford/GM/Chrysler Crossover, and announced that it was barely able to make it on the road before running out of fuel, oil, and R134a refrigerant for the A/C.
That would also have gotten them some eyeballs.
I think bias has a lot to do with this. Half the country thinks that the incremental cost of each Chevy Volt is about $50k because the anti-electric mob performed a dubious calculation that included sunk costs divided by total units sold early on in the car's history (you have to wonder why Apple ever made the iPod, as by these guys calculations the first few hundred cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make...) and it's become a thing, especially in the automotive industry, to just pretend that the technology is attrociously bad.
No wonder Tesla Motors is upset. They're trying something new, in the process trying to make the world a better place (yes, I know they're also out to make money, but they could make a luxury car with fewer acceptance problems if they just stuck a six cylinder engine in it, and make a lot more money as a result), and they're being pissed all over by irrational jackasses who are more obsessed with upsetting environmentalists than they are with actually enjoying themselves or being happy.
These people are why we can't have nice things.
Cool story bro. However, in today's world "right wing extremists" refers to members of the Republican party with extreme authoritarian positions. Sure, the Republican church is a broad church, but it's not Ron Paul we're talking about, it's evil nutjobs like former terrorist fundraiser and current Islamaphobe Peter King, and much of the Tea Party caucus who seem to think that spending money on healthcare is tyranny, but spending it on imprisoning foreigners without trial is A-OK as long as they're suspected of terrorism.
(As for defining liberalism by the war time excesses of an all-over-the-map populist President seventy years ago, I hope you can see the problem with that.)
Well, that's a shame, because if you don't use the same definition of the word "open" as the rest of us we can't actually answer your question. We have no way of saying "Well, there's FoozleJava 3.X", and you then responding, "No, I'm saying I want it to be truly open", and us saying "But there are ports to every platform in existance, and it's under the GPL", and you saying "Yes, but I'm using my definition of the word open, and that means it has to be compatible with the Microsoft Public License.
And after we go around in circles a few times, we throw our hands up in exasperation.
OpenJDK is free software. It's licensed under a free license. It is built using a community model of development, albeit one steered by Oracle. And to answer your concern, which seems to be more about portability than openness, it's largely POSIX code and has been ported to the BSDs (cite: https://wikis.oracle.com/display/OpenJDK/BSDPort)
No, it definitely was a few months, and no, peer reviewed science that's been the scientific consensus for something like four decades now, while continuing to attract pseudo-scepticism from certain influential political groups and popular media outlets, is hardly a "fad".
Every fucking time there's a global warming article, some idiot has to pretend that scientists were similarly convinced by "global cooling" in the 1970s. The fact is a hypothesis was raised that was quickly proven false and scientists went on to look at other things. No amount of "But the media hyped it" or "But Vegans against Tree Rape hyped it" or "But my third grade social studies teacher hyped it" type arguments change those facts.
Try something else.
Old Union working practices are/were certainly part of the problem, but they're not the whole story. A huge amount of this is economies of scale (not monetary, but in being able to run well) when you're making the same things as the factory next door, and have the market split between you and a hundred other companies.
Regulatory? To a certain extent, but it's interesting that when people rail against "regulations" and "bureaucracy", it's rare that they can make a compelling case that a particular regulation is causing a problem. That's not true in all cases (I continue to be amazed that the US railroad system works as well as it does given the ludicrous regulatory and taxation based infrastructure it continues to grapple with), but wanting to start a factory? For the most part, the additional regulations you need to deal with that you don't starting, say, an office, are to do with safety and the environment. Given we don't want our workers to lose their hands or die, and we don't want our rivers poluted with toxic waste, I'm not entirely sure I want the regulations changed unless we're very, very, careful.
How would it be political suicide? You are aware we already see foaming mouths and mad screeching from the right wingnutters?
When I lost my job three years ago, I started getting calls from Indian outsourcing centers who were trying to hire me. They weren't trying to get me to move to India either! Turned out their clients found the timezone/language*/distance thing an issue, and wanted American developers, they just didn't want them on their own payroll.
So no, American developers didn't lose their jobs to cheaper Indian counterparts. They lost their jobs because American businesses didn't want to employ programmers, they wanted to hire outside companies to do the work on a long term basis, and India had the right model - groups of anonymous programmers, charging by the hour, who would do work based upon specs you'd provide.
And if it wasn't for the timezone/language*/distance thing, it'd have been a complete success and IT staff in the US would be having the same problems as factory workers. As it is, IT suffered very little impact from the recession.
In some ways, it would be worth American entrepreneurs looking at the Indian outsourcing models, looking at where they're succeeding, and where they're not, and look to build local businesses that offer the same services, before some other country does eat our lunch again.
* Yes, I know English is well spoken in India, but accents and dialects have an impact.
It's worth pointing out that I also received dubious presentations of unscientific material when I was at Middle School. I remember being told that all oil would run out in 20 years. They even had a presentation by some outside experts to warn us of the impending oil shortage. Was it ever a scientific consensus that all oil would disappear in that time scale? No. Did some environmentalists keep making the claim based upon a dubious argument about the availability of known oil supplies and a complete misunderstanding of economics? Well, yes, but that doesn't change the lack of scientific credibility for the argument. Did the media hype the story? Why yes, but it remains meaningless. And for what it's worth, the "20 years" thing seemed to last... well, 20 years, always being 20 years no matter when the urgent call to action was being made, while "global cooling" was a fad for a few months.
There was never anything approaching a scientific consensus about global cooling, and indeed it was debunked as a hypothesis within a few months of appearing on the radar. It made it into the MSM you say? Why, there's a surprise! Because we all know that the Weekly World News is on a par with Nature for its peer reviewed science.
As for your last paragraph, I strongly suggest you start reading up on the subject rather than relying upon tired simplifications from Fox News (or your Middle School, I guess) and actually start listening to what climate scientists are actually saying, rather than twisted contextually challenged versions of what they're saying. It's certainly more than reasonable for a climate scientist to assert that more severe weather events may be due to temperature changes, given temperature changes will have an affect on weather patterns. But no-one in the climate science group will ever tell you that a particular blizzard was "caused by" global warming.
Nobody has lost a job in the US because someone else could do the job in another country for less.
I can safely say this because while labor may make up a high proportion of the costs of goods and services that you buy, manufacturing labor (as in "people who man assembly lines" - the people who actually lose their jobs when Dell closes a factory and buys circuit boards from Foxconn) make up a tiny proportion of the labor portion. The classic 80:20 rule, which applied during the 1980s and is, today, even worse, tells you that 80% of the "labor" portion of the goods is paid to the top 20% high earners in each company, and high earners generally haven't been outsourced.
Why, then, did Dell and others outsource? Flexibility. It's about being able to send a new PCB layout to a factory and receive the first batch of 100,000 circuit boards inside of a week rather than months. The simple truth is that Foxconn et al ate our lunches. They weren't cheaper (not significantly, anyway), they were simply better at it, and very attractive to companies that didn't want to spend time and money on running a large, inflexible, corporation.
No, "Global cooling" was never a "big scare", despite the anti-science myth machine constantly claiming otherwise.
1. Congress has had years to do something about this and has refused to act.
2. The camp is unconstitutional.
3. The camp does more harm than good.
The problem is we have a President who prefers to appear to be a wimpy appeaser of right wing extremists than be an actual liberal.
The only way to defeat a bad helicopter with a gun is a good helicopter with a gun.
320,000? I see a market for an even more exclusive phone...
Well, define gun (and for that matter define "make".) Anyone can make a zip gun, but something more sophisticated without using prebuilt parts designed to be part of a gun does take a certain amount of specialist knowledge and the type of tools that aren't found in most people's garages.
The practical upshot of the "printable AR-15 lower" is that it's now possible for someone with a 3D printer to usefully order an AR-15 by mail. That's it. In theory a minor legislative tweak, for example, requiring that bolt carriers and barrels be subject to the same rules that a "gun" as defined by the ATF (ie no mail order except between FFL holders) would fix that and return everything to the status quo.
The printable magazine? Virtually everyone who's been asked to comment on the proposed restrictions on magazine sizes has said the same thing: that it's a nice token gesture, but it's not enforceable because of the ease with which it can be circumvented. Indeed, I suspect most lay-people actually underestimate, not overestimate, the work required to make a useful detachable magazine.
If you've ever been to a bookshop you'll have seen books on sale at ridiculously low prices too. It's not unheard of in any industry to put things on "special offer" in order to "sell more stuff".
In addition, this case is about Amazon trying to make its ebooks less expensive than Apple's, B&N's, etc. It is not about Amazon trying to undercut paper book prices, and indeed, as the GGP correctly noted, Amazon frequently charges more for eBooks than new paper books (and virtually always more for eBooks than Amazon charges for used paper copies.)
I'm not sure why you'd think people are buying Kindles to get cheaper books, but it just isn't true, and that's not the attraction.
People aren't buying eBooks because they're cheap, they're buying them because you can be pretty much anywhere, and suddenly think "Wait? Stephen King has a new book out? It's been WEEKS since the last one!", whip out your Kindle, select the book, buy it, and start reading it within a minute of having that thought.
And later that day, you can think "Hmmm, what was that fuss about involving King and Kubrick? Oh yeah, I read about that in "The Making of The Shining", let me just take a look at that. And you can witch to that book.
And then you can think "OMG, I don't remember where it was in this tome, but hold on, I have this nifty search button", and then find the relevent pages.
eBooks are 100% about convenience, and 0% about price. It's instant gratification. And while you lose one type of flexibility, you gain other types. And the ability to search or have access to your book without notice may well be more useful to you than the ability to have a copy 20 years from now, or the ability to lend the book to a friend.
It may even be worth paying more for.
I think you might be thinking of the website, which underwent a rebranding recently to distance itself from the cable news network. This popular MSNBC show, for example, has MSNBC branding all over it: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3036789/ns/msnbc_tv-morning_joe/
It can be if it presents something in a negative light that's technically true on one level, but not in the sense that readers will think.
The way the campaign will be interpreted is that your privacy is being breached by the people of Google who are reading (not automatically processing) your emails. The reality is that an algorithm is used by a non-sentient computer to determine relevent ads to show you.
I, in common with most people I guess, really don't give two hoots about the latter. Indeed, as I've said before, if ads are going to be foisted on me, I'd rather see ads for Android phones and S&M equipment than for women's shoes and motorcycle insurance. And I care about how Google determines the former are more suited than the latter and the privacy controls it implements to prevent such data falling into the wrong hands, not the fact that Google figures it out in the first place.
I generally agree although I also don't think it needs to be quite as sophisticated as it is. But that said, answering my own criticism, does supporting multiple character sets, colors, and screen sizes really add so much bloat it'd be worth stripping it down?